Barzan munched pizza, guzzled beer while watching torture
From Shyam Bhatia in Baghdad, Deccan Herald, Bangalore
April 18
A half-brother of Saddam Hussein, Barzan Ibrahim Hasan who is accused of mass murder and torture is under interrogation after becoming the US forces' most important catch in their hunt for the leaders of the Iraqi regime.
The 53-year-old's capture comes just days after another of Saddam's three half-brothers, Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, was caught trying to escape across the Syrian border.
US sources believe a third brother made it to Damascus, but Syria denies he is there.
Last night coalition military chiefs were also looking at reports that the Iraqi information minister dubbed "Comical Ali" had committed suicide. Newspaper reports in Iran said Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who repeatedly claimed that Iraq was winning the war, had hanged himself.
Al-Sahhaf is not on the US list of Saddam's 55 most-wanted henchmen, but he was still being sought, after becoming the mouthpiece for the Iraqi regime during the conflict.
The scale of the brutality by Barzan, who is on the US list, began to emerge after his arrest.
One opposition figure told how he ate pizza and guzzled beer while torturing him in Baghdad's infamous "Palace of the End".
Another victim, a leading military officer, claimed Barzan invited him over for a drink and then forced him to watch his wife being raped and poisoned.
And according to sworn affidavits given to London-based human rights group Indict, he delighted in pulling out victims' fingernails, pouring boiling water over them and delivering electric shocks.
Witnesses also claimed Barzan, said to be Saddam's favourite brother, was present when Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft was executed as a spy in Iraq in 1990. His worst crime, though, is said to have been organising the disappearance of up to 8,000 members of a Kurdish tribe in 1982, including boys as young as 14.
$33 BILLION FORTUNE: For many years Barzan, who was made Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva in 1988 and stayed there for 10 years, also acted as Saddam's banker with his hands on the purse strings of a $33 billion fortune.
A military source said: "This is the biggest catch we've had so far. This guy was was one of the worst and his hands are soaked in the blood of innocent people. We hope he can give us some good information and we will be relentless in tracking down the rest of them." As coalition forces continued to question Barzan, it emerged that thousands of unmarkedgraves had been found outside the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
Kurdish officials said at least 2,000 unmarked graves were discovered and they believed it was a mass grave from atrocities against the Kurds in the late 1980s. The United Nations said it would also investigate reports that Saddam ordered thousands of Kurds and Shiite Muslims to be executed and buried in mass graves at Tharthar and Al Anbar in the desert west of Baghdad in the 1980s and 1990s.
Victims are said to have been bussed out to the desert, machine-gunned and buried in the sand. Five shallow grave sites were also discovered by UK forces at Al Zubayr near Basra in the south and were being examined.
Meanwhile, in Basra itself, soldiers from the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades at a bridge. There was also resistance north of Baghdad where the US Army's 4th Infantry Division had to fight Iraqi forces at an airfield and US officials said there were "pockets of resistance and lawlessness" in Mosul.
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